In Feb. 2021, I earned my official affiliate faculty title at the OU School of Meteorology. This means I act essentially like adjunct faculty as an Assistant Professor. It comes with new privileges in how I can mentor students and teach courses in official ways.

Since then, I worked to develop a new course. I noticed when I was a graduate student at OU that there was a big gap in measurement instruction at the graduate level; I wanted to fill it. So I built METR 4603/5603 – Advanced Observations for Lower Atmospheric Research.

A slash listed course open to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, this course is designed to operate differently than a typical class. There are no exams, with focus instead on group instruction, guest lectures, instrument demonstrations, and data-focused exercises and projects. Material presented focuses on modern and state-of-the-art instruments applied to current research problems. Students use Python for processing, analysis, and visualization of real observed datasets (I aim to have the students collect data themselves to analyze in class!), helping prepare students for research careers.

The main goals of the course are to expose students to modern research-grade instrumentation, leveraging the collaboration available in the National Weather Center. Students also build the important skill of synthesis, bringing observations and information together in a meaningful way to address any given research problem. Finally, via exposure to the instruments and course-related work students will gain experience in data processing and visualization using real, modern, scientific datasets. Even if students leave the field, these skills should be transferrable to many career paths and fields.

Course materials from the first offering (2021 Fall) have been made available on this website, though I expect to make changes to the class using feedback from the first students that took the class! In 2021, I enlisted a team of co-instructors to make execution of the class possible and to bring in expertise across topics. Dr. Petra Klein covered surface measurements and classic in-situ turbulence measurements; Dr. Tyler Bell covered thermodynamics and uncrewed aircraft; Dr. Liz Pillar-Little covered UAS and Atmospheric Chemistry.